Mike Fine: March Madness? More like March Sadness

Thursday

Mar 25, 2010 at 12:01 AMMar 25, 2010 at 5:07 PM

This year is so nuts. This is no longer March Madness. It’s March Sadness, and when the tourney resumes tonight, it’ll be tough to even watch.There’s nothing like devouring this tournament when your brackets are alive and kicking. It’s all spinach and liver when you’ve got no shot.

Mike Fine

A friend runs a March Madness pool every year. This year he’s got 149 entrees. I —uh, my wife -- picked two brackets, as many people do, going with “her” best guess on No. 1 and throwing in some possible upsets on No. 2.

I’m (OK, Linda) tied for 67th on my No. 2 bracket and 80th with No. 1. But I guess I can’t complain.

This year is so nuts. This is no longer March Madness. It’s March Sadness, and when the tourney resumes tonight, it’ll be tough to even watch.

There’s nothing like devouring this tournament when your brackets are alive and kicking. It’s all spinach and liver when you’ve got no shot.

It’s not like those of us at the bottom of the list are complete idiots. Many of us do quite nicely every year, but that was before Ali Farokhmanesh was draining 3s, before Ryan Wittman enrolled in the Ivy League, and before Omar Samhan came out of nowhere.

The fact is, most of us do not sit in front of the TV watching college basketball every night from November through March.

Most of us know that Bob Huggins wears sweat suits and that Tom Izzo has some pretty slick hair. We don’t know how to spell Krzyzewski but we know that his Duke teams are annually among the front-runners, as is Kentucky. We know that John Calipari would recruit a third-grade dropout if it meant he could give him one strong year and that Rick Pitino could sell a granny dress to a bikini model.

But do we really know anything about their teams? We’ve heard all about John Wall and Evan Turner and the Player of the Year competition, but we couldn’t name a single one of their teammates, even if we do know they play for Kentucky and Ohio State, respectively.

The one thing we surely didn’t know this year, though, was that St. Mary’s College, which upset Richmond and Villanova and has a chance of doing so to Baylor in the Sweet 16, is from a place called Moraga, Calif.

Nor did we know that the Gaels feature five Australians, one of whom is Samhan, the 6-11 son of an Egyptian, who scored 32 points with 10 rebounds in the win over Villanova.

We had no way of knowing that 13th-seeded Murray State would be taking out No. 4 Vanderbilt, or that No. 11 Old Dominion would take out No. 6 Notre Dame, or that No. 12 Cornell would take out No. 5 Temple, going on after a win over No. 4 Wisconsin to become the first Ivy League school in 30 years to make the Sweet 16.

So, yeah, it would seem that brackets have been busted and that all hope is lost.

But, y’know, in the pool I’m a part of, there’s a statistic that lists the maximum number of points that a participant can earn. My No. 67 bracket has a maximum of 113 points, given that I picked Kansas to beat out Duke in the championship game. The person in the No. 1 spot is at 120 maximum points.